Hindering Touch

A Force Spike taped to the Storm mechanic, and the awkwardness of that pairing is the whole story. Mana Leak's family of soft counters works because they punish a tapped-out opponent: the tax is supposed to land in a window where the caster cannot pay it. Hindering Touch tries to make that tax scale with Storm count, copying the counter for each spell cast earlier in the turn. The math falls apart immediately. By the time you have a Storm count worth chaining off, the deck casting Hindering Touch is itself a combo shell, and the soft-counter clause assumes a fair, resource-constrained opponent who is the last thing a Storm deck is trying to beat. You are paying four mana on a counterspell that the controller can simply pay through, then asking that same counterspell to be your payoff for a turn you would rather have spent killing them. It is a design built from two halves that want different decks: the tax counter belongs in a tempo deck with no Storm enablers, and the Storm rider belongs in a deck that has no use for a tax counter. The card sits in the narrow Scourge band of "Storm bolted onto a spell that does not want it," a set-cycle experiment in stapling the mechanic to effects of wildly varying ceilings. Tendrils of Agony got the marquee version; this got the leftover slot.